Microsoft Windows 11 Could Boost Intel Alder Lake Performance

Windows 11 is being planned as a free upgrade to Windows 10 at some point in the future and it looks as though it could be more than just a facelift. Intel plans to launch their first “bigSMALL” architecture CPU, Alder Lake, later this year which will support a new scheduler that is being reported could improve the performance of Alder Lake and other processors based on this big and SMALL core design.

Early testing using a leaked Windows 11 ISO and a Lakefield Core i7-L16G7 has shown that the Intel Alder Lake CPU got a potential 5% boost from a new hardware scheduler. HotHardware was the first to stumble upon this, showing improvements when there is a big and LITTLE core architecture. This could potentially mean that Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake processors will get a similar lift in performance, seeing as the new Microsoft Windows update is made for big SMALL designs.

With Alder Lake set to be at the forefront with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 and potential boosts in performance through Windows 11, Intel could in theory close the gap on AMD with its next launch. This is hard to see but plausible and would also benefit any future bigLITTLE designs from AMD in the future.